Interview

by Dan GoldwasserPublished: November 20, 2001

Earlier last year, composer Howard Shore was signed to a three picture deal
to score the highly-anticipated film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings
trilogy. SoundtrackNet had a chance to talk with Howard about his work on this
epic film, and the challenges he faced in putting the soundtrack together.

How long is the score in the film?

The score is about two hours
and thirty minutes in the film, although over three hours were composed.

How did you figure out what to put on the album?

That was one of the hardest
things to do because I wanted to represent all the areas of the film on the
CD. It's an opera length score, but because there are only seventy-two minutes
on the album, I had to take each section of the film and edit them down to make
those essential tracks. It's a very thematic score, and there's some great
linkage between the cues which could not be represented on one CD.

You'll first hear the Fellowship
theme forming in the film when Frodo leaves Hobbiton with Sam on his way to
Bree - but it's just a fragment of the theme. Later on, after they meet up
with Merry and Pippin in the cornfield, you hear a more developed version of
the theme - it's growing. Then they get to Bree and they meet Strider, and
it develops even further as they leave Bree. Once in Rivendell, when they meet
Gimli and Legolas and Gandalf arrives, the Fellowship is now in its full orchestrated
form. At the end of "The Council of Elrond" cue, you hear the full,
grand statement of the Fellowship Theme. So the two and a half hours of score
is very carefully shaped in terms of the thematic material - how it's introduced
and developed throughout the whole film.

When I first started writing,
I started with the Moria sequence. Moria was part of the screening at the Cannes
Film Festival this year. I spent six weeks writing that one section, which is
represented by two tracks on the album: "Journey in the Dark" and
"The Bridge of Khazad-Dum", running a total of about ten minutes on
the CD. But that piece is closer to twenty minutes long in the film, so it's
been condensed.

How long had you been working on the film?

I was attached to the film
in July 2000, and had a prior commitment with The Score in January 2001.
I started writing intensely in February on the Moria sequence, and I had started
writing thematic material as far back as October. I wrote the Shire theme,
and Frodo's Theme in October, and the Fellowship Theme in November. But before
any of that, I did about four months of research.

I had read the Tolkien books
back in the 1960s, but besides re-reading them, I also researched Ring mythology.
I went off on a lot of tangents - literary, musical, and cinematic. Ring mythology
has been part of our culture for thousands of years - you had to know what led
up to Tolkien writing Lord of the Rings, and you had to understand what impact
the books had on other cultures after that how it affected literature, movies,
popular culture, music - it's had quite an impact.

I've done other literary
adaptations. Naked Lunch, Crash, Silence of the Lambs,
and Looking for Richard, whichwas an adaptation of Shakespeare's
Richard III. I like doing the research because you can go back hundreds
of years, and see many various elements and influences. Middle Earth existed
seven thousand years ago - it pre-dates our culture!

Did you ever feel like there was too much pressure on you due to the hype
surrounding the project?

That's why I mentioned the
other literary adaptations. It wasn't so much a feeling of pressure as it was
of responsibility. When I was working on Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
was still alive, he was aware of the film and came to the set - you knew you
had to create something substantial. That novel had a worldwide cult following,
so you felt the same responsibility to that and you wanted to create something
authentic. It's very similar to Lord of the Rings – to create something
that the people who are enthusiastic about it and who are interested in Lord
of the Rings would embrace. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh were fantastic
collaborators, and we were fans of the book and all Tolkien mythology as well.
So not only were we trying to do it for us, and make it as good as we possibly
could, but we wanted to do it for everybody who was interested in Lord of
the Rings.

Did you work with a Tolkien lyricist for the chorus?

I had great collaborators
on this project: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. I spent quite
a lot of time with them, learning as much as I could about Lord of the Rings
and about the mythology of it, and even just trying to catch up with them -
because they had spent years researching it. Philippa is a Tolkien scholar,
so there was much to learn from her. She was predominantly the person that
I worked with in terms of the text for the choir. There's a lot of vocal music
in the score, and I'll explain why that is.

There are lyrics and poems
in the book. Because of the length of motion pictures, you couldn't expect
to include them all - the book is written in a way where it will stop for three
or four pages and go through the lyrics of a song, or a poem - it had a pace
that you couldn't specifically do on film because even in three hours the story
is so vast and there are so many characters with so much detail. The idea that
I had with Peter, Fran and Philippa was to put the language back into the film
- through the music. Philippa wrote new text for very specific scenes - she
wrote pages of poems and text based on those scenes. She wrote a poem called
"The Revelation of the Ringwraiths", and that's the vocal music you
hear on the first part of the CD with all that gothic sound - it's Adunaic,
the ancient speech of men.

How large was the orchestra and choir?

The ensemble was 200 pieces.
There was a 100-piece symphony orchestra, the London Philharmonic, which is
a great orchestra and one that I've worked with for 15 years and have a strong
connection to. Then there was a 60-voice all male choir that sang the Dwarvish
music, because Peter wanted all of the sounds in Moria to be male oriented due
to the predominately masculine Dwarvish culture. A mixed choir was used for
Rivendell and Lothlorien, they actually have quite different sounds as you can
hear on the CD. They sang in Elvish (Quenya and Sindarin) and Black Speech -
they did all of the Wraith singing. I used a 30-piece boy's choir to represent
the innocence of Frodo and Sam - I really enjoyed that particular quality.
They sing in Elvish, and they sing in English. You can hear Frodo's Theme develop
throughout the movie - it starts out in a Celtic fashion in Hobbiton, and evolves
into a hymn called "In Dreams" written by Fran Walsh, and sung by
soloist Edward Roth. There are actually ten soloists on the film. Miriam Stockley
sings the beginning of "Lothlorien", and Elizabeth Fraser (of the
Cocteau Twins) sings "Gandalf's Lament" which you also hear in that
track. Enya sings in Sindarin and Quenya, two types of Elvish language; "Aniron"
is done in Sindarin and "May It Be" has a chorus in Quenya. I orchestrated
the score myself, and I orchestrated Enya's music as well - to give it that
cohesive flow. I wanted the piece to feel as if it were from one hand. Her
songs grow right out of the score. That's the same way that all of the vocal
music - the 90 singers and more - were all integrated as well as I could into
this one piece.

I thought of it as Act One
of an opera. When you go to the opera, you quite often may have a symphony
orchestra in the pit, a sixty-person choir on stage, and soloists. You could
make the argument that all film music is operatic, but this is different. Between
the orchestra and the choir, I had 200 pieces at my disposal, as part of my
palette to work from. There are also some North African instruments, and an
Indian bowed lute which I used in "Lothlorien".

Given the operatic form, and sheer amount of music in the score, do you
anticipate a more comprehensive soundtrack release at some point?

Yes - we should do that.
You have to realize, also, that Lord of the Rings is a nine-hour film,
and that's our goal - at some point there will be a nine-hour DVD. The Fellowship
of the Ring is just Act One of a three act piece. The other films are not
sequels - they're a part of the continuing story. You're following Frodo and
Sam through these different worlds, on their way to Mordor.

When do you start on the second film, The Two Towers?

Well, work has already begun
on the film - they're editing it and putting it together now. I recently had
a few concert works premier, one for the Australian Art Orchestra called "Orbit"
at this year's Melbourne Festival, and the Dallas Symphony played a suite from
Ed Wood in their Halloween Sci-Fi concert. So I had been working on
those. I also have some other commissions coming up - I have some chamber music
to write, and I also have some other film projects. Now I'm looking to take
a break from Middle Earth - but I'll be right back there with The Two Towers
next year!

The soundtrack album to Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
is available from Reprise Records. The film opens nationwide on December 19,
and worldwide shortly thereafter. For more information, read our "first listen" exclusive on the soundtrack here.